Henri Nouwen for the NextGen
By Teesha Hadra, C4SO NextGen Leadership Team
Like a good Anglican, I am a fan of Henri Nouwen. In his book, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, he shares what he has learned about leadership while living alongside men and women with various mental and physical disabilities at the L’Arche community.
One of this book’s most poignant, and indeed challenging, lessons was the need to see ministry as a “communal and mutual experience.” In other words, leaders must recognize that they are equally in need of care as anyone whom God has entrusted to them. In taking on this posture, leaders do not sit on high disseminating wisdom to those below. Rather, they sit with others, eye to eye, teaching and learning, transforming and being transformed.
Nouwen’s call to mutuality in Christian leadership is particularly difficult in children, youth and college settings, what we call NextGen ministry and broadly termed students. This population is younger than their adult leaders and typically has less life experience. Under these circumstances, it is easy to assume that students have little, if anything, to offer adults in the way of spiritual formation. Adult leaders can become closed off to the ways God wants to use students to teach and transform them.
Being open to learning from students takes on a special importance when working with students of races, cultures, and ethnicities that are different from our own. Being unable (or unwilling) to learn from students risks making the same mistakes as many early missionaries as they sought to impose a “superior” way of life on people from foreign lands, paying no attention to their stories or lived experiences. The goal is not to colonize students, but to walk with them as we all grow in Christlikeness. Ultimately, we must embody the ways that Christ rejected typical notions of power and importance, embracing humility instead.
If we can embrace the NextGen as potential teachers, they are freed up to lead within the Church. According to The Great Opportunity, a report commissioned by the Pinetops Foundation, over 1 million youth will leave the Church each year for the next three decades. Among the report’s recommendations to address this staggering projection is to integrate young people into the life and work of the Church. In so doing, the Church can mobilize today’s youth to do the work God has called the Church to do, including reaching and empowering the next generation.
We have a tendency to equate leadership with being in charge and having some amount of power over a group of people. Nouwen presents an alternative view of leadership rooted in the example of Christ. According to Nouwen, “Leadership, for a large part, means to be led.” When it comes to NextGen in the Church, we will need to lead them and be led by them, for the sake of the flourishing of the whole body of Christ.
Teesha Hadra is completing her MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary and currently serves as the Executive Pastor at Church of the Resurrection in Los Angeles. Teesha recently co-authored Black and White: Disrupting Racism One Friendship at a Time with her friend, John Hambrick.
1 Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 2002).
2 Pinetops Foundation, “The Great Opportunity: The American Church in 2050,” accessed on September 6, 2019, https://www.greatopportunity.org/#.
3 The Great Opportunity, 65.